On March 9th, 2020, a day after International Women’s Day, women all over Mexico stopped. This was how they protested the unrelenting wave of gender-based violence in Mexico. They showed that if women stop, the world stops.
This is a text mining project of social media activity around the “Paro Nacional” (National Strike).
Twitter was scrapped in multiple sessions, looking for tweets with one or more of the #UnDiaSinMujeres #UnDiaSinNosotras #ParoNacional #9M hash-tags. These hash-tags represented the movement started by Mexican women to strike on March 9th, 2020. The sample data includes 108,522 original tweets, scraped in multiple sessions between February 12th and March 14th, 2020. Quotes, re-tweets, and replies were excluded.
According to a report from Mexican news media, the initiative for a national strike on March 9th took off with a tweet from a feminist collective based in the state of Veracruz:
The tweet was posted on the afternoon of Tuesday, February 18th (Mexico time). Three days after a seven-year-old girl, Fatima Aldrighett, was found dead after being abducted from her school on February 11th. What happened to Fatima came only three days after the murder of Ingrid Escamilla. Both cases received large media attention in Mexico and abroad.
This time series plot shows the increase of original tweets with hash tags #UnDiaSinNosotras, #UnDiaSinMujeres, #paronacional or #9M after February 18th, 2020.
Number of original tweets containing one or more of the #UnDiaSinMujeres #UnDiaSinNosotras #ParoNacional #9M hash-tags. Ingrid Escamilla was found on February 9th. Fatima Aldrighett was found on February 15th. On February 18th, las brujas del mar, the twitter account of a feminist collective from Veracruz, call for a natiional stike on March 9th.
This initiative of Mexican women received social media support from other expatriates and women in other countries. In fact, women mobilized in many other countries in Latin-America and around the world between March 8th and 9th, 2020.
In Argentina, the social media activity reflects the large mobilization of women in protest demanding the right to choose, justice, and denouncing the traffic of women. The protest took place on March 9th, 2020.
Location of original tweets containing the #UnDiaSinMujeres #UnDiaSinNosotras #ParoNacional #9M hash-tags. Only a small fraction of the dataset contained geolocation information. Most tweets come from Mexico, in particular around Mexico City, the country’s capital. Social media activity in Latin-America reflects similar protest and mobilisations, for example in Chile and Argentina. Tweets from Europe seem to be from expatriates.
Women called: “El 9 ninguna se mueve”, on the 9th, we stop. They did not go to work, they did not travel, they did not buy anything, some did not even used social media. But they were not silent.
News media outlets, organizations, men, politicians, journalists, supported the movement on social media. From the data sample, 42,126 original tweets had a time stamp on March 9th. They came mainly from Mexico and Argentina.
A word frequency analysis shows the subjects (nouns) or actions (verbs) tweeted on March 9th, 2020. Preparing the data for this analysis included lower casing all words, removing tildes to avoid duplicates from inconsistent spelling, excluding stop words, URLs and emoticons.
The most common subject in the original tweets was “niunamas”, not-[loosing]-one-more. This hash-tag reflects the same sentiment as “niunamenos”, not-one-less. There are also mentions to the mobilization on March 8th, 2020, International Women’s Day: “8M”, “8M2020”, and “March8M”.
Single-word frequencies in original tweets from March 9th that contained one or more of the #UnDiaSinMujeres #UnDiaSinNosotras #ParoNacional #9M hash-tags. Single word frequency analysis excluded the aforementioned hash-tags
Analyzing bi-grams helps visualize the frequency of the two consecutive words These add information to single word frequency trends.
The most popular bi-grams in original tweets from March 9th were a combination of hash-tags. For example, “niunamas” and “niunamenos”, “nosotrasparamos” and “9M”.
Bi-gram frequencies in original tweets containing one or more of the #UnDiaSinMujeres #UnDiaSinNosotras #ParoNacional #9M hash-tags. Bigram frequency analysis excluded the aforementioned hash-tags.
During the national strike, the words "mujer and “mujeres”, woman and women, were often preceded by words detonating frustration and anger, but also unity and support.
The word network below shows the words most often associated with "mujer and “mujeres”. The arrow size is proportional to the times that word was associated with "mujer and “mujeres”.
Word network analysis for "mujer* and “mujeres”, woman and women, in original tweets from March 9th, 2020.*
Sentiment analysis allows approximating the emotional content of text. In this case, the emotion in social media post. This analysis is conducted by linking words to dictionaries of words and sentiments.
The NRC library was used to map scores of 10 sentiments: trust, fear, sadness, anger, surprise, disgust, joy, anticipation, negative, and positive.
The graphs below maps the over sentiments in tweets during March 9th, the national strike day. The greater the score of a given sentiment, the greater the number of words associated with that sentiment. A single tweet can have valences for multiple sentiments.
Sentiment analysis of original tweets from March 9th, 2020, that contained one or more of the #UnDiaSinMujeres #UnDiaSinNosotras #ParoNacional #9M hash-tags. Only tweets in Spanish were used in this analysis (n = 31,295). Sentiment scores are from the NRC library.